A Very Die Hard Christmas

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I’m Alex Johnson, joined by Kiah Haslett, Jason Mikula, and Jason Henrichs. Four people. Two Jasons. It’s been a while!

Our group text has been arguing about the same thing for years, so we finally took it to the mic: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

The plan is simple. We spend an hour talking about Die Hard and pull it apart using ten questions I randomly came up with.

We start with how each of us came to the movie. VHS scarcity. Delayed first viewings. Pausing the movie mid-stream to Google financial instruments. From there, we get into Bruce Willis, the accidental invention of the everyman action hero, and why this movie doesn’t work with Stallone, Schwarzenegger, or a 70-year-old Frank Sinatra crawling through air vents.

Then we talk about villains, specifically, Hans Gruber. Along the way, we touch upon the FBI’s truly heroic ability to make everything worse, and just how many people in this movie are objectively bad at their jobs.

At the center of it all is the plot device that sends us down the deepest rabbit hole: bearer bonds. Kiah walks us through what they were, why they existed, when they disappeared, and why it’s not totally impossible that some are still out there. Yes, it’s more educational than anyone intended.

We wrap with favorite quotes, questions about workplace behavior in the 1980s, and the annual argument about what qualifies as a Christmas movie and who is allowed to die in one.

It’s unserious. It’s overthought. It’s our most festive episode yet.

Thanks for listening!

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